Obama secures $1.15 billion in reparations for black farmers

In 1999, the USDA agreed to pay $1 billion to 16,000 black farmers. A judge had ruled that the agency had a 50-year history of discriminating against African-Americans, back when virtually every agency was discriminating against African-Americans. But that wasn't enough for the black farmers and one former senator.

Critics argued that more than 70,000 farmers were shut out of the lawsuit. In 2008, then-Sen. Barack Obama and Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley got a law passed to reopen the case, and the settlement talks moved forward.

The USDA and the farmers reached a deal last month to award another $1.25 billion for the rural blacks. All this is to make amends for a grievance that occurred decades ago and that was solved 11 years ago. Now the government has to find a way to pony up over a billion dollars before the imposed deadline of March 31. If the money isn't appropriated in time, both parties could walk away from the table and the case could rage on. The black farmers, who were initially demanding $2.5 billion but settled, are likely to do just that. With staggering amounts of debt piling up and the Congress in paralysis after the health care debate, Obama needs to find a way to shove his latest affirmative action payout through and fast.

Obama's affirmative action college scheme

As we've seen countless times, Obama views the world through race-tinted glasses. Now in another executive order dumped on a Friday afternoon, the president is showing just how obsessed he is with affirmative action schemes. He's willing to kick more federal aid to Historically Black Colleges and Universities, but exclude all others.

The executive order establishes the White House Initiative on Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). As we've seen over and over, whenever Obama wants to grossly increase spending for something, he always appoints a commission first. The commission then always recommends increasing spending and Obama agrees. So when this long executive order says the commission will "identify Federal programs and initiatives in which HBCUs may be either underserved or underused as national resources," it means "find ways to spend more."

And it's not just racial ideology driving the president. Obama has many cronies in high places at HBCUs. One example is Howard University in Washington, DC, which is headed up by Barry Rand. Rand has strong connections to Obama and is also president of the AARP, which supported the health care reform bill at Obama's request. Rand took a lot of heat for supporting ObamaCare, so no doubt he'll appreciate the kickbacks to Howard U.

All colleges are suffering from the bad economy right now. If Obama is going to be a wild-eyed spender, why can't he appoint a commission to study all colleges, black, white, and everything in between?

The new codeword: Environmental Justice

Barack Obama and his radical leftists have come up with an almost endless list of weird Orwellian terms. These include: community reinvestment, community organizing, localism, and affirmative action. They all mean basically the same ugly thing: redistributing wealth from upper-class whites to lower-class African-Americans by mandate from the government.

Now there's a new codeword to watch out for: Environmental Justice. A favorite of the Environmental Protection Agency and its administrator Lisa Jackson, environmental justice has historically meant stopping pesticides that cause massive harm to the environment, for example. But in Barack Obama's world, the term takes on a whole new meaning: sticking it to the corporations while prioritizing African-Americans and Hispanics over whites.

Here's how EPA Administrator Jackson put it in a recent memo: "We are building strong working relationships with tribes, communities of color, economically distressed cities and towns, young people and others, but this is just a start. We must include environmental justice principles in all of our decisions." She goes on to talk about how the EPA must protect "vulnerable subpopulations".

The EPA's job is to protect the American environment. But in Barack Obama's world, it becomes just another instrument to lift up liberal minority interest groups at the expense of everyone else.